Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Back in March, following up on an NPR feature, I profiled former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor al-Dayfi (aka Mansoor al-Zahari), a Yemeni citizen who was released from the prison in July 2016, but was not repatriated because the US refuses to send any Yemenis home, citing security concerns. Instead, like dozens of other men (including stateless Palestinians, and some other men in whose cases it was regarded as unsafe for them to be repatriated), he was sent to a third country after intense US negotiations.

In al-Dayfi’s case, he was sent to Serbia, where, it is clear, he has struggled to adapt, telling Arun Rath of NPR, “When they brought me to Serbia they make my life worse. They totally kill my dreams. It’s making my life worse. … Not because I like Guantánamo, but my life become worse here. I feel I am in another jail.”

He told Rath that, as I described it, “he wanted to be sent to an Arab country, and to protest his conditions he embarked on a hunger strike, just as he had at Guantánamo.”

It is impossible not to sympathise with al-Dayfi, an evidently bright man, and an insignificant prisoner of the “war on terror,” whose long imprisonment was a result of him being a victim of mistaken identity, and who, in Guantánamo, also developed a fascination for US culture, which, as I described it, involved him “becoming a fan of Taylor Swift, Shakira, Game of Thrones (although he felt there was too much bloodshed), US sitcoms, Christopher Nolan movies and Little House on the Prairie, which ‘remind[ed] him of his very rural home with few modern conveniences.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the first two months of the Trump administration.

Last week, I posted an article about Hedi Hammami, a Tunisian national held in Guantánamo for eight years, who was released in 2010, but is suffering in his homeland, where he is subjected to persecution by the authorities.

I drew on an article in the New York Times by Carlotta Gall, and I’m pleased to note that, two weeks ago, NPR also focused on the story of a former Guantánamo prisoner as part of a two-hour special on Guantánamo, and Frontline broadcast a 50-minute documentary.

I’m glad to see these reports, because Guantánamo has, in general, slipped off the radar right now, as Donald Trump weighs up whether or not to issue an executive order scrapping President Obama’s unfulfilled promise to close the prison, and ordering new prisoners to be sent there, but the stories of the former prisoners provide a powerful reminder of how wrong Guantánamo has always been, and how much damage it has caused to so many of the men held there. Read the rest of this entry »